I realised the limitations of Sketchup Free so I just downloaded the trial version of Sketchup Studio 2023. I’m hoping this will allow me to replace the sky with an image.
The city I’m designing is a prison colony on the Saturn moon of Enceladus, so I need Saturn in the sky. Can someone please tell me which buttons I need to press to make this happen?
PS. I tried inserting images into the scene but they get in the way of my modelling. If the sky was replaced by an image instead of a basic colour, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I have tried to create a sky dome like in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD0RByUZNmA but he doesn’t explain how he summoned the eyedropper tool to use his image as paint. This would be a good workaround, although Sketchup crashed when my circle for the dome had 100 points instead of 24, and I have to make sure I build my model without zooming out too far.
You could check out this video on how to project images on curved surfaces:
Could be helpfull before you checkout these alternative ways of changing backgrounds:
Depending on usage, i often use a watermark as a background. This way you can setup multiple watermarks and easily apply them to specific styles/scenes.
The first video, which is six years old, demonstrates how to select certain polygons for projection. This could allow me to place Saturn on a Sky Dome with minimal warping.
The second video is vastly inferior to the sky dome because its just a curved rectangle, and no good for VR.
I tried the watermark idea but the sky doesn’t move at all when you look around.
Thanks for your ideas. Projecting components of the sky such as Saturn onto selected dome polygons seems like the best workaround until sky images are introduced to Sketchup, or until I find out how to make sketchup believe that an image is a ‘colour’. I was hoping the V-Ray would solve it all…
I discovered how to use the eyedropper tool for images, and maybe colours as well. It’s called ‘sampling’, and is achieved by holding down the Alt key in Paint Bucket Mode (Shortcut key: B).
I created a sky dome but it destroys shadows. Also Sketchup makes navigation hard when there are distant objects in the model. And there is extreme clipping. I tried clicking Camera>Zoom Extents as mentioned in other posts to solve the clipping but it doesn’t have any effect. As you can see, the clipping is massively reduced at 16s when I delete the sky dome.
I’ve reduced the entire city and surrounds down to 100km diameter. I am still getting clipping at 10m as shown in the video, but this sky is the best I can hope for with this program, based on everything I’ve read. I hope this video helps someone. Sketchup Studio 2023 apparently has no solution for sky images
Clipping in this program appears to occur at 0.01% scale. This may be due to the limitations of OpenGL. I hope this is solved soon. It affects everyone.
If you have downloaded studio you will have access to the Vray plugin. Vray can create photorealistic renderings of your SketchUp model and can use something called a dome light image for lighting. It would be a big learning curve for you but I wonder if a custom Vray dome light image could be what you are looking for?
It is compatible, some extensions aren’t checked by the developers after every new SketchUp release, they have to tick the extensions as compatible and sometimes fix some errors, but i have installed that extension and works fine.
